103k shares share tweet sms send email By: | August 6, 2015 8:34 am Ronda Rousey’s life was profiled by Rolling Stone in May. The feature highlights the complications surrounding Rousey’s birth, during which her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, which was considered a possible cause for her perceived learning disability. From the story: In her first six years, nobody knew whether she’d ever speak an intelligent sentence, such were the after effects of being born with an umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. It could be that her gibberish and mumblings were signs of brain damage. No one knew, and her parents — Ron, an aerospace-industry executive, and De Mars, an educational psychologist and statistician — moved when she was three from Riverside, California, to Jamestown, North Dakota, in part to be near the Minot State University speech therapists, who set about bringing her vocal cords to their senses. This passage resonated with Laura Smith, a private clinician in Denver whospecializes in childhood apraxia of speech. Apraxia of speech is a for speech production. According to Smith, it’s not a well known condition and one she says she didn’t even recognize in . When she read Rousey’s profile, Smith decided she and her daughter Ashlynn had to meet the undefeated UFC fighter and learn more about her story. As luck would have it, Rousey had an upcoming book signing in Denver, giving her the opportunity to ask her burning question. Smith shared her meeting with Rousey : “Did you have apraxia?” Ronda stopped signing, looked me in the eye and said, “What did you just say?” “Uh, uh, apraxia? Dyspraxia? Was that your speech impediment?” She looked incredulous and repeated, “Apraxia, yes, this is what they think I had.” “They wanted to put me in a special classroom away from my friends. They thought I was stupid! But by fourth grade I was top of my class in algebra, and by high school I tested gifted.” After the meeting, Smith went to Rousey’s Facebook page to likeit and found the following message from the UFC star, along with a brochure Smith had given her. , , , , 103k shares share tweet sms send email